Michael Russo has covered the National Hockey League since 1995. He has covered the Minnesota Wild for the Star Tribune since 2005, after 10 years of covering the Florida Panthers for the Sun-Sentinel. He uses “Russo’s Rants” to feed a wide-ranging hockey-centric discussion with readers, and can be heard weekly on KFAN (100.3 FM) radio and seen weekly on Fox Sports North.

O'Sullivan excited about coming to Minnesota; Latendresse to go under knife

Greetings. Kent Youngblood here; Russo has the day off. Or at least I thought he did.

Anyway, a few items:

1. Guillaume Latendress will have two surgeries Wednesday. The first will be to repair the torn labrum in his hip. He will also have a bilateral sports hernia repaired.

GM Chuck Fletcher said the team expected he'd return before the end of the season. We'll see if he makes it. Both Niklas Backstrom and Josh Harding took months to recover from their hip surgeries. It's interesting now that three of the Twin Cities' four pro sports teams have been affected by hip surgeries: The Vikings (Rice), the Wolves (Jonny Flynn) and now the Wild.

2. Patrick O'Sullivan is very excited to be coming back to the franchise that drafted him. "It's weird, that's for sure," he said by phone Tuesday afternoon. "It's a different situation, obviously. Not really the way, maybe, you'd want to come back to somewhere. At the same time, with Carolina, it wasn't working out. I'm excited to go somewhere where I'll have an opportunity."

O'Sullivan had been getting very limited minutes playing on the fourth line in Carolina. Today Wild coach Todd Richards said O'Sullivan was probably going to be skating with the top two lines and will get time with Havlat on the second power play unit.

It's my guess that O'Sullivan -- who is flying in tonight and will play tomorrow against Philadelphia -- will start out with Matt Cullen on the second line.I'll have more from O'Sullivan in tomorrow's paper.

3. Chuck Kobasew returned to practice today. A good sign for sure, but Richards said he would not play Wednesday.

"Russo Radio" tonight at 6 p.m. on 1500 ESPN, so tune in. Russo will be joining Jim Souhan and will be sitting in for longer than usual